


Firebird

by Sholio



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M, Getting Together, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27914323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: They had called her Vers because it was all they had of her name, but her daemon had always known its name, even when it didn't know its shape.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Yon-Rogg
Comments: 5
Kudos: 44
Collections: Mild Heart Attack 2020: Short Treats Collection





	Firebird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prosodiical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosodiical/gifts).



> You said you like daemon AUs, and it occurred to me that I've never seen one for this movie and really loved the idea!

He knew her first by her daemon, of course. There was nothing else like it in the galaxy, at least nothing Yon-Rogg had ever seen. Even here, in a junkyard planet a dozen gates from anywhere Vers was likely to be, there could not possibly be anything else like it. 

Which meant that even with the tan travel cloak covering her body, the hood hiding her face, he knew her. The woman who had just walked through the door of this backwater, frontier-planet bar, with the electric firebird shedding sparks and light on her shoulder, had to be Vers.

He drew back into the shadows, as if they could hide him from that pitiless light. Under the table, he felt dark fur and lithe muscles brush his leg as Kalvir half-rose, pricking her mobile ears.

The flickering light of Lockheed's electric feathers filled the saloon, glimmering off the walls like reflections of plasma fire. The woman went to the bar, leaned on it, exchanged a few words and a couple of unit tabs with the Xandarian bartender. And then, of course, she turned and came his way.

He sighed. It was probably inevitable. He dropped a hand to Kalvir's head, although the sekhound was not tensed for the attack. It was eagerness that he sensed in the other half of his soul.

Kalvir had always liked Vers.

She pulled out a chair and sat down across from him. She didn't appear to be armed. But then, she wouldn't have to be. They both knew just how easily she could beat him bare-handed. She pushed back her hood—and it was her, of course, but it was still a shock to see her face here, six Hala years after he'd last seen her. Her hair was short now, giving her a weird resemblance to the electric hawk sitting on her shoulder.

In a way he was glad he'd been there to see it settle. Even if she'd been beating the crap out of him and Starforce at the time.

On Hala, her daemon had never settled. She had never known why. He knew, of course. It was because she was a mystery to herself, so her daemon leaped from one shape to another: ordinary shapes, like kletok and watercat, and extraordinary shapes, exotic creatures Yon-Rogg had known must be animals from Terra, half-remembered somewhere in her subconscious. 

He had always expected her daemon to settle as a bird. And it had ... just not as he'd expected.

Under the table, he felt something brush his leg—Kalvir's tail—and fiercely clamped a hand over the sekhound's muzzle before his damn daemon could _say_ anything. Since Hala, she almost never spoke—she'd been taciturn even before—but this _would_ be one of the rare times.

"Not going to offer me a drink?" Vers asked, smiling a little. She dipped her gaze toward the bottle on his side of the table. He hadn't been bothering with a glass.

"Why the hell not," he muttered, shoving the bottle across the table toward her.

She picked it up, arched a brow, and took a swig.

She was so much the same—except for her daemon. He couldn't even look at it; the brilliance hurt his eyes, adapted as they were to the dim light in the bar. Back on Hala, Lockheed had been friendly but reserved, as if on some level he knew what Yon-Rogg had done.

They had called her Vers because it was all they had of her name, but her daemon had always known its name, even when it didn't know its shape.

"Ah. God. That's terrible." She coughed and set the bottle down. "You used to have better taste."

"I used to command Starforce and have all the resources of the Kree military at my disposal, Vers."

The corners of her mouth, which had started to twitch up, tightened and flattened out. "It's Carol, and you know that."

Kalvir slowly swished her tail again. At least she was under the table so Vers couldn't see it. Instead, Yon-Rogg leaned his elbow on the table and tried to look like he wasn't half-drunk in a bar halfway across the galaxy from Hala, wearing the scrapped and patched-together remains of his Kree armor and selling himself as a mercenary.

"What in the ten hells do you _want,_ Vers?" He used the name on purpose this time.

Her mouth flattened a little further, then twitched up again. "God, it was satisfying dragging you across the desert and throwing you off my planet," she muttered, and took another long drink of his whiskey. She coughed again. "Gah, that's bad."

"Sending me back to Hala to be tortured and publicly fired as an example of what happens to Kree who fail? Very satisfying for you, I'm sure."

Her smile didn't falter, but he knew her well enough to see the change in her eyes, something flickering, there and gone. On her shoulder, the firebird shuffled a little. Yon-Rogg managed to raise his gaze to look at it, but its hooded hawk's eyes gave nothing away.

"You stole my entire life, lied to me, made me think I was _less._ In all my life," Vers said, "no one's ever done that, not successfully, until you. I guess you think that makes you special."

"I think you're here, which means you want something," he said. "Don't you, Vers?"

She squeezed her hand on the neck of the bottle and a lambent gold-and-blue flame kindled in her fingers, melting the bottle's neck to slag. It was quick, reflexive, and sudden. It seemed to startle her almost as much as it did him. Her firebird's feathers went from gold to hotter blue around the tips, and beneath the table, Kalvir's tail stopped wagging.

"Call me that one more time," she said quietly, "and I'll walk out that door forever, and you'll never know why I'm here. I may or may not burn you to ash before I go."

"I'm trembling in my boots," he said with all the calm he could muster. His heart battered against his ribs, and Kalvir pressed against his knees. He wasn't afraid of death, but after Hala, he was very afraid of pain. Once, he would have said that Vers—Carol—didn't have it in her. But he no longer knew that. Not after everything he'd seen her do.

After everything he'd done to her.

She breathed out slowly and peeled her hands off the bottle's neck. Her fingers were printed into the molten glass that had cooled around them. "I have a better class of booze back on my ship. I can introduce you to an Earth thing called Scotch. You'll enjoy it. It's perfect for the grizzled, alcoholic mercenary image you're cultivating here."

"Of course you have a ship." While _he_ had a cot in a flophouse two streets over. "What do you want, V—"

He stopped.

She regarded him with a flat gaze.

He didn't need her. Didn't owe her. Had no reason to stop her from walking out that door like she'd threatened. 

Kalvir pressed the flat, hard top of her skull against his hand, solid beneath the fur. Her ears flicked low and raised again. 

"Carol," he said.

She smiled and got up. "Let's talk on the ship. The ambiance is better, and there's booze that won't strip paint."

***

On her ship, he showered and shaved and changed into the soft, folded clothes she left outside the shower enclosure.

The ship was a one-person corvette. There was one shower and one cabin. Which meant this molded plastic cubby of a shower had seen plenty of Ver—of Carol's naked body, the long muscular length of her, dipping her head beneath the shower spray to scrub all-body soap through her short firebird-gold hair.

If she even needed to shower anymore. Which was, admittedly, not a given.

She was a fire god that he had, for a short time, harnessed and tried to convince that she was a mortal woman. No wonder she hated him.

When he came out and dressed, he found Kalvir lying on the room's only bed, the sekhound's lean black body stretched out on the rumpled blankets that still had the imprint of Carol's body.

"Get off there."

The sekhound dipped her ears and didn't, but she raised her lean, aristocratic head and turned it toward the door of the cabin.

The cabin was, of course, a complete mess, personal items and intimate pieces of clothing thrown around, bed all in a tangle. He didn't even know how many times he'd ordered her to tidy up her quarters on Hala, with mixed success. There were times when he'd wondered if she was really that careless of her things or just out to annoy him, and times when he suspected it was both.

Now he flushed and put on the loose, dark clothes she'd given him—men's clothes, a reasonably good fit, clearly not hers. He had no idea where she had gotten them or why she had them around.

It even smelled like Carol in here, a spicy musk of sweat and bare, warm skin. He hadn't realized that her smell was so deeply embedded in his subconscious, enough to kick him in the hindbrain and send him straight back to those nights sparring in the barracks gym, the sweat-slick clasp of her hand and the higher-than-usual heat of her body. He had never known for sure if it was the core energy inside her or just a Terran thing. He still didn't know.

They had never slept together on Hala. In truth, he wasn't entirely sure why not, except that it hadn't seemed right, and back then he had devoted a lot of time to what was right and what was not.

Then he'd had his entire moral code turned on its ear—centered as it was around Hala and what was good for the Kree. And then he'd tried not giving a fuck for a while, and now he was ... here.

Kalvir hopped off the bed and trotted to the door. She pressed her pointed nose into the crack between door and bulkhead.

"Yeah, guess we can't stay in here forever," he muttered. 

He had carefully piled his armor beside the bed when he'd taken it off. Now he knelt and checked his weapons. As far as he could tell, they were all still there. She hadn't made him take anything off when he came onto the ship. He strapped a knife to his ankle, tucked another down the back of the loose black trousers, and strapped on the phase pistol; he'd worn it openly onto the ship, so if she objected to him wearing it to whatever council she had in mind, it was on her to make that point.

He opened the cabin door and found a small meal laid out on the low table in the ship's tiny lounge, and V—Carol sitting at it, on a cushion on the floor. Her daemon was perched on a luggage rack behind her, its amber glow turning the lounge to something firelit and strangely rustic, in a way that was about as opposite Hala's sterile city towers as it was possible to imagine.

"Oh, there you are," Carol said, looking up with a smile. "Keep a girl waiting, why don't you."

He realized that he had stopped in the doorway, in a cloud of steam from the shower, scented with her soap. Taking a breath, he palmed it shut. Kalvir had already trotted to flop on a cushion near the table. She pricked her long, tapered ears at Carol.

"Hello, girl," Carol said, giving his daemon a smile. Kalvir's tail swished slowly across the cushion.

She had stripped out of the cloak. Beneath it, she wore a loose, short-sleeved black top and form-fitting trousers that stopped above her ankles. Her feet were bare, and even their shape was familiar, slim with long, strong toes.

He sat across from her. The meal was on plastic trays. He didn't recognize the cuisine, but there was a lot of it, and it was heavy on the proteins. It had been a while since he'd had as much as he wanted of anything. He dug in.

Carol filled two plastic cups from a squat glass bottle of dark amber liquid. "Scotch," she said. "From Earth. I'm really more of a bourbon and Miller girl, but this is for special occasions and business deals."

"Which is this?" he asked before cramming in another mouthful.

"I guess we'll figure that out," she said, and for a minute she just watched him eat with a look that was almost sad before she jammed her utensils into the contents of her own tray.

"Wasn't sure if you still did that," he said.

"Did what?" she asked, looking up from cutting a square off a protein block.

"Eat."

There was a silence. She took a bite and washed it down from her cup of amber alcohol. He did likewise; it was earthy with a rich deep burn.

Then she said, "It's complicated."

At that, he laughed. He had to. He knocked back his drink and refilled the cup from her bottle. "What isn't?"

"That's how you're drinking these days, is it," she said when he drained half the cup on the second go.

"I'm Kree. We're resilient."

And there were three or four different things in that statement that they weren't talking about, so silence fell again, but only briefly this time. Lockheed launched himself from the luggage rack in a short flurry of wings and thumped onto the edge of the table. He nipped at the edge of some roasted vegetables on Carol's tray with the curving edge of his sharp beak. 

Yon-Rogg could feel the heat of his feathers. The bird, washed in fire, tilted his head and then hopped a step closer to Yon-Rogg's tray and tilted his head again. There was a glimmer of an opaque avian eye, and Yon-Rogg couldn't help thinking of a night years ago, in a time and a place now lost to him, when Lockheed had been in the shape of a long silver-furred animal—small ears, small sinuous neck. As Starforce sprawled about drinking in the barracks, Lockheed had lain along Vers's leg and looked up at Yon-Rogg with bright eyes so similar to those, and yet so different. Almost close enough to touch.

The firebird nipped a crumb of protein cake from the decimated contents of his tray. Yon-Rogg would have objected, except it wasn't really in him to be bothered by it. She used to steal his food back on Hala too, a playful intrusion into his space that he complained about but never actually minded.

"Do you know what he is?" Carol asked.

He looked up quickly. Maybe the Terran alcohol was going to his head faster than he'd expected, combined with the relaxation of the shower and decent food for the first time in a while. Not to mention a bottle and a half of cheap Drohani rotgut earlier. In any case, he'd better hope she wasn't planning a double-cross, because he had stopped paying his usual wary, half-paranoid attention to every move she made.

Maybe it was just that, on some level, he still trusted her.

In any case, she was leaning an elbow on the table, chin resting in her hand. Her eyes were softer than they had been in the bar. Some Carol, some Vers.

"He's a red-shouldered hawk," she said. "He settled when I was seventeen. He'd been cycling mainly through raptors and other birds for the last few years, so I figured it was going to be something like that. Something with wings. There was never really any doubt in my mind that Lockheed and I were going to fly."

"I knew he'd settle in a winged form," Yon-Rogg said without really thinking about it, only to see her eyes go colder, more raptorlike, reminding him sharply of what he'd almost forgotten: that Lockheed had only been in flux when he had known them because of what he had done to her on Terra.

She reached for the bottle and poured herself more of the Earth whiskey.

"I hear that you have contacts in several of the inner worlds," she said, and just like that, it was business.

But when they had finished eating, when he was sagging from weariness and the unaccustomed sedation of a full meal, she got up and gestured to him.

"Come," she said. "There's no need to sleep out here, unless you want to."

There was no hesitation. He came.

***

They undressed in her cabin, which would have been dark, but for the glimmering of Lockheed's torch-gold feathers. It was like firelight, and in that lambent golden and orange light, she unceremoniously stripped and so did he. 

It was not to be warm and romantic, with his hands turning down the collar of her black shirt to kiss the flat muscles above her full, high breasts, or her gentle touch peeling down the band of his trousers. It was businesslike, in its way: they undressed themselves, not each other, and then she took him by the shoulders and put him down on her bed.

But it was, in its way, a long time coming. And it was good—it was kind, it was more tender than it had any right to be, and she ended up with her ankles crossed over his, their legs tangled together and her head resting against his neck.

The room flickered with Lockheed's light, and Kalvir lay stretched out on Carol's floor like a black shadow in the shape of a dog.

He didn't ask her if this was what forgiveness looked like. He didn't want to know. Besides, the answer might change tomorrow. But he felt no fear of her—of what she had become—and when he looked around, the room was nearly dark and Lockheed was beside Kalvir on the rug, head tucked under his wing, his bright feathers banked down to coals.

**Author's Note:**

> Yon-Rogg's daemon basically looks like ancient Egyptian depictions of jackals, but bigger. Imagine Anubis's head on the body of some kind of very large black sighthound, like a huge saluki or greyhound.


End file.
